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The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition

This review article presents evidence for the claim that frequency effects are pervasive in children's first language acquisition, and hence constitute a phenomenon that any successful account must explain. The article is organized around four key domains of research: children's acquisitio...

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Autores principales: AMBRIDGE, BEN, KIDD, EVAN, ROWLAND, CAROLINE F., THEAKSTON, ANNA L.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Cambridge University Press 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4531466/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25644408
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S030500091400049X
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author AMBRIDGE, BEN
KIDD, EVAN
ROWLAND, CAROLINE F.
THEAKSTON, ANNA L.
author_facet AMBRIDGE, BEN
KIDD, EVAN
ROWLAND, CAROLINE F.
THEAKSTON, ANNA L.
author_sort AMBRIDGE, BEN
collection PubMed
description This review article presents evidence for the claim that frequency effects are pervasive in children's first language acquisition, and hence constitute a phenomenon that any successful account must explain. The article is organized around four key domains of research: children's acquisition of single words, inflectional morphology, simple syntactic constructions, and more advanced constructions. In presenting this evidence, we develop five theses. (i) There exist different types of frequency effect, from effects at the level of concrete lexical strings to effects at the level of abstract cues to thematic-role assignment, as well as effects of both token and type, and absolute and relative, frequency. High-frequency forms are (ii) early acquired and (iii) prevent errors in contexts where they are the target, but also (iv) cause errors in contexts in which a competing lower-frequency form is the target. (v) Frequency effects interact with other factors (e.g. serial position, utterance length), and the patterning of these interactions is generally informative with regard to the nature of the learning mechanism. We conclude by arguing that any successful account of language acquisition, from whatever theoretical standpoint, must be frequency sensitive to the extent that it can explain the effects documented in this review, and outline some types of account that do and do not meet this criterion.
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spelling pubmed-45314662015-08-13 The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition AMBRIDGE, BEN KIDD, EVAN ROWLAND, CAROLINE F. THEAKSTON, ANNA L. J Child Lang Review Article This review article presents evidence for the claim that frequency effects are pervasive in children's first language acquisition, and hence constitute a phenomenon that any successful account must explain. The article is organized around four key domains of research: children's acquisition of single words, inflectional morphology, simple syntactic constructions, and more advanced constructions. In presenting this evidence, we develop five theses. (i) There exist different types of frequency effect, from effects at the level of concrete lexical strings to effects at the level of abstract cues to thematic-role assignment, as well as effects of both token and type, and absolute and relative, frequency. High-frequency forms are (ii) early acquired and (iii) prevent errors in contexts where they are the target, but also (iv) cause errors in contexts in which a competing lower-frequency form is the target. (v) Frequency effects interact with other factors (e.g. serial position, utterance length), and the patterning of these interactions is generally informative with regard to the nature of the learning mechanism. We conclude by arguing that any successful account of language acquisition, from whatever theoretical standpoint, must be frequency sensitive to the extent that it can explain the effects documented in this review, and outline some types of account that do and do not meet this criterion. Cambridge University Press 2015-03 /pmc/articles/PMC4531466/ /pubmed/25644408 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S030500091400049X Text en © Cambridge University Press 2015 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Review Article
AMBRIDGE, BEN
KIDD, EVAN
ROWLAND, CAROLINE F.
THEAKSTON, ANNA L.
The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition
title The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition
title_full The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition
title_fullStr The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition
title_full_unstemmed The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition
title_short The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition
title_sort ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition
topic Review Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4531466/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25644408
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S030500091400049X
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